Honestly? Cucumber sorting sounds like a shitty job. Very few people are picketing because humans aren't spending large swaths of their lives churning butter.
But the tone of the article is ridiculous. For any reasonable definition of "it works", the system doesn't work yet.
No one's saying it's a great job. But the point for many of these people is that it's a job. Which they won't easily be able to find a replacement for.
Why do you think they're low-skill workers just because they're doing agriculture? From the article "It takes months to learn the system and you can't just hire part-time workers during the busiest period.".